Providing opportunities for potential customers to evaluate or try software applications may lead to increased sales volume for software manufacturers. However, the effort required to acquire and install trial versions of software products may deter potential buyers from investing the time or system resources. In addition, users are often hesitant to install unfamiliar software due to the potential risks to their system. This is especially the case for version one products which potential buyers may not know much about and are likely to be unsure about the value they can expect. One option for providing trial versions of an application is to mail out trial CDs. This option typically is costly, does not scale, and leaves the software vulnerable to piracy. Another disadvantage of CDs is that they do not provide a means to track the percentage of target users that receive and actually install the trial product.
Terminal services (TS) work in conjunction with clients to provide a network-based client/server computing environment in which much of the processing load is shifted from the client to the server. The client and the terminal server operate in what is called a thin-client computing environment. TS is a component of a server's operating system that allows for remote access to the server. Servers in this environment must manage TS sessions and applications for multiple users concurrently. However, previous TS platforms require the user to provide entries to signup for an account or self authenticate and download a trial version of the software.
Without receiving signup inputs from each user to establish a private profile per user, previous TS platforms would require multiple users to share the same profile. Consequently, multiple users using the same desktop environment and/or the same profile folder could start interacting with each other's documents and start sending each other questionable content. There are other security risks, such as viruses, associated with multiple users using the same profile. Previous TS platforms also do not offer the ability to have custom-coded metrics logged for analysis.
Another shortcoming of previous TS platforms is that they don't provide the capability to pass custom data into TS sessions from web pages, nor do they provide locked down sessions. Locked down sessions prevent users from impacting the system on which the hosted application is running. With TS, an account has to be created and then given to a user. The user then has to type credentials in, click connect, and point to the right server. Previous TS platforms can be coded such that the TS front pages point to a given server, and an account can be hard coded. However, the problem remains that all users that hit the page will be using the same account and the same profile.
It is with respect to these considerations and others that the present invention has been made.